Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Frankenstein, victor (fictional character) – fiction“

Beginning with a case in Part 1 of this article, I illustrate a key difference between the person who comes to therapy and the figure(s) who come for therapy. In Part 2, I describe some features of a literary approach that attend to this difference and animate diagnostic descriptions with images and stories found in literature. Using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and drawing on my rereading of her tale, I demonstrate in Part 3 how the character of Victor Frankenstein and his story vividly personify and enrich the DSM category of narcissistic personality disorder. This approach does not reduce Victor Frankenstein and his story to the diagnosis; it magnifies the diagnostic category through the lens of his image and his story.

Actuality. The modern study of literature now does not give the answer for a question, if it is possible to create a character of a man from the life by facilities of nonfiction narration, however, it is convincing and full-blooded in the reader’s perception as an artistic image. Stating the Subject of the Study: forming of character-image of writer V. Petrov-Domontovych in the circle of the Ukrainian emigrants of the post-war wave due to their remembrances, letters, and essays. Research methodology: through the comparative hermeneutic interpretation of texts, and also later fiction texts that formed the character-image of V. Petrov. Stating the Aim of the Study. Other mechanisms of reader reception work in nonfiction genres, then in fiction, id est it becomes possible another result – the character of real V. Petrov. Results of the Study and originality. The image of Victor Petrov, formed in the memory of representatives of Ukrainian literary emigration and recorded in their memoirs and correspondence, is no less ambivalent, than images of characters in the fictional works of Victor Domontovych. Expatriate contemporaries saw their colleague differently and remembered in different situations, however, it is significant that people, in many respects disagree with moral assessments, hostile to others (as Ihor Kachurovsky, who always biased towards Yuri Sherekh-Shevelov and even repeated stereotyped allegations against him after his death) they were largely controversial in the estimation of V. Petrov. On the one hand, V. Domontovych deserved respect as a talented prose writer; on the other hand, V. Petrov was a mystery as a person. His collaboration with the Soviet special services did not cause unequivocal condemnation, since the circumstances of his "disappearance" from Munich in 1949 remained unclear. Most of those people who spoke about this event immediately after it was treated to the disappeared man with compassion because they suspected the "human beings"-brothers (Yuriy Lavrinenko) from the Soviet side. Image of V. Petrov mostly appears "split", as well as images of characters in the novels of V. Domontovich. The practical significance. In non-fictional texts, the researcher can trace the path of the formation of the image and stereotype, returning and approaching the prototype.

The article examines how Joyce’s detached attitude to progress in the novel Ulysses transforms into the parody-comic anti-scientism of Victor Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The Russian author not only refuses to recognize positive ontology as of scientific mood but also reduces its mission only to the destruction of reality and return to the basic intuition. The paper proves that Joyce’s methods of splitting the consciousness of the one acquiring scientific knowledge (cognizer) are rethought by Pelevin as the cognizer’s consciousness multiplied to infinity, which produces a subjective multiple reality, turning into a hypertext. Therefore, Pelevin turns Joyce’s hypostatized elements into independent agents, being characters of a new type. These characters are faced with the question of their real / possible existence in a subjective multiple reality. Thus, these new characters are interpreted within the framework of the subject-object antinomy, as fiction proceeds from subject-object relations. The paper aims to determine the influence of the Joycean principle of splitting subjective consciousness in Ulysses on the creation by V. Pelevin of characters and ways of expressing the new type in Empire ‘V’. The subject of study is the features of the invention of the new-type characters as a tool for organizing fictional decisions in Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The paper is the first study to prove that the artistic method showing the split consciousness in the heroes of the Pelevin’s novel directly develops Joyce’s epistemological tradition of the cognizer’s crisis, but in the era of weird-philosophy. The main research techniques employed: comparative method, historical and cultural contextualization, discourse analysis.

The article is dedicated to the study of the literary mirror game with the cultural heritage in the Frank Einstein books by Jon Scieszka. The Frank Einstein books were first translated and published in Ukraine in 2019. This article is the first investigation of the Frank Einstein series by J. Scieszka as a literary game. Six Frank Einstein books (“Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor” (2014), “Frank Einstein and the Electro-Finger” (2015), ‘Frank Einstein and the BrainTurbo” (2015), “Frank Einstein and the EvoBlaster Belt” (2016), “Frank Einstein and the Bio-Action Gizmo” (2017) and “Frank Einstein and the Space-Time Zipper” (2019)) demonstrate vivid examples of the literary game in the contemporary children’s literature from the positions of the author as a game creator and the reader as a game opponent. J. Scieszka was born in 1954 in Flint, Michigan, USA. The future writer received a varied education. He attended the military academy, then studied English and pre-med at Albion College for his B.A., and in 1980 received a master's degree of Fine Arts in fiction writing at Columbia University. After graduation J. Scieszka worked as a teacher at an elementary school. Teaching schoolchildren, Jon re-discovered how smart they are. School children turned to be the best audience for the weird and funny stories he had always liked to read and write. The books by Jon Scieszka are based on recognizable archetypal plots and iconic characters, which are not presented to the reader in a conserved form, but focused on the current stage of culture and science development. The writer cheerfully and humorously manipulates well-known plots, rewrites established ideas, and interprets familiar literary themes, motives, characters, etc., presented in world-famous science fiction, well-known to the modern young reader. J. Scieszka says that he got his ideas from other books, his kids, kids he had taught, kids he had learned from, watching movies, playing with his cat, talking to his wife. He also includes allusions to his favourite writers – Cervantes, Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, Sterne, Barth, Heller (Scieszka, 2014). J. Scieszka uses a repertoire of prominent scientific and literary samples in his work, such as the character of the scientist Frankenstein by M. Shelley and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, the inventor and businessman Thomas Edison, a fictional character Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the primatologist Jane Goodall. There is a mechanism of mirror doubling in the system of characters: Frankenstein and Frank Einstein, Albert Einstein and Al. Einstein, Klink and Klank, and the complex mirror refraction of Frank Einstein and Watson as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Frank Einstein and T. Edison as Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. The article analyses the well-known literary and scientific achievements that acquire a mirror replay in the books about Frank Einstein. The researcher concludes that the books by J. Sciezska are a source of vivid emotional experiences and motivation for serious readers’ reflection. The author of the article draws attention to the fact that the play field created by J. Scieszka is a product of accumulated cultural content, which activates the human tendency to imitate, assimilate and repeat. This game is a form of conscious assimilation and processing of the universe of intangible and material artifacts, objectified actions and relations created by mankind in the process of mastering nature.

Chaotic human behavior refers to the exhibition of unpredictable, disrupted, or disordered manners. The chaotic individuals embrace chaos as a means of self-expression or rebellion against particular harmful experience and to defy societal norms. They act impulsively and destructively; their behavior may stem from a desire to disrupt established systems or challenge authority. When they reach the edge of chaos, the most exciting place to be, though it is insecure condition sometimes, to get balance between order and chaos, they manage to overcome their limitations and liberating themselves from the self-destructing thoughts, accordingly they reorder the disorder and chaos. In fiction, such characters often create conflicts and unpredictability within the story. They can serve as catalysts for conflict, pushing other characters to question their own beliefs or take action. Fictional example of chaotic characters include in Chalk Palahniuk's Choke. This paper aims at analyzing the human behavior within a chaotic system and suggests chaos theory as a systematic approach to analyze the novel Choke, demonstrating human behavior between determinism and free will within a chaotic system, handling the life of its main character, Victor, who live in chaos as a consequence of his damaging childhood and his struggle scrutinizing his behavior to get order back. He advocates for anarchy and destruction as a means of personal liberation, whose violent and antisocial behavior challenges the boundaries of morality. This novel serves as catalysts for chaos and reordering the disorder. To attain this aim, the study adapts chaos theory as an approach of analyzing this topic in Choke. At the end when he reached the maximum of chaos, he gets the balance between order and chaos liberating himself from his self-destructive thoughts. He owns eventually a free will to change his destiny and find out new paths of happiness and self-organization.

Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein is a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic text Frankenstein that profoundly challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day, by drawing on posthuman ideas about the constitution of the self. In this novel, Winterson portrays various forms of ‘monsters’ such as AI, lifelike sex dolls and transgender embodiment. Drawing on both Frankenstein as a text and the infamous creation story of the novel, Winterson creates a deeply intertextual cast of characters that blurs the following: Ry (Mary Shelley), a transgender doctor, Ron Lord (Lord Byron), the creator of a line of sex bots, and Professor Stein (Frankenstein), a scientist interested in AI and cryopreservation. Framed by vignettes of Shelley’s composition of Frankenstein, these characters draw together a set of highly contemporary desires and anxieties about the relationship between the social and science, the ways in which matter is always articulated through both the discursive and the material, and how, to quote Karen Barad, “what often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all” (“Posthumanist Performativity” 803). Winterson implicitly and explicitly explores ideas of the posthuman—for instance, in the novel Stein gives a lecture titled “The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World” (74)—and suggests that the future is one in which “binaries belong to our carbon-based past” (72), in ways both liberating and disturbing. While Stein talks about our posthuman future of overcoming even death with the zeal of an evangelist, Winterson undercuts this celebratory rhetoric by situating these emerging forms of self-making in a lineage of the monstrous—”Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created—the first non-human intelligence” (27)—that suggests the posthuman itself to be a kind of monstrosity. For Winterson, the contemporary monster is one bound up in technologies of self-making, an ambivalent process of both promise and danger that entangles us with monstrosity: “Frankenstein in the monster ... the monster in Frankenstein” (130). Drawing on posthuman theory, I propose that we can read Winterson’s novel as suggesting that modern subjectivity in itself has become defined by hybridity, a mixing between human and non-human elements that problematises many of the boundaries of selfhood that Enlightenment humanism valourised for so long. As Donna Haraway famously said in her “Cyborg Manifesto”: late Twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (11) Against this historical backdrop, Winterson suggests that new forms of being human—or becoming posthuman—are emerging, in which sex, gender and sexuality have become profoundly entangled with various forms of biological and informational technology. “We’re still biology but we’re better biology” says Stein (113), suggesting that the future holds new forms of modifications of the body, including smart implants and the uploading of consciousness to computing systems. In situating transgender treatments, AI and sex-bots in a lineage of the monstrous that begins with Frankenstein, Winterson (as much as posthuman theorists), is interested in the way that new forms of technologies mean that all subjectivity has become monstrous itself. But what might it mean to be posthuman? Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has suggested that our post-Enlightenment, posthuman era is one in which the category of the human has become problematised. She says, “not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that” (1). For Braidotti, women, people of colour and LGBT people have never been accorded fully human status, and as such the rapid technological change that has challenged humanity as a category is to be embraced, if not precisely uncritically. She argues that posthuman subjectivity is notable for the way that it collapses the boundary between nature and culture, and for the interweaving between human and non-human elements in contemporary life. I want to suggest that one name for those subjects that Braidotti describes that ‘have never have been quite’ human is monster. The figure of the monster deployed by Winterson is one that haunts contemporary ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. Nikita Mazurov has called the monster a “continuous, unstable project of both disassembly or ex-figuration and of unsanctioned coupling” (262), a posthuman praxis of “hybridity of form” that challenges state-sanctioned productions of the self. The monster challenges ideas of fixity, the metaphysics of presence and essence that created the humanist project. It is, in this sense, abject in the sense that Julia Kristeva famously described, as that which “disturbs identity, system, order [and] does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The composition of the monster collapses such foundational binaries as male/female, gay/straight, dead/alive, human/machine, human/animal, black/white, and inside/outside. “The monster is one who lives in transition”, as Paul Preciado says (“Can the Monster Speak” 20). Monsters have therefore historically done profound cultural work, for as Jack Halberstam has said, “monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (22). As Frankissstein suggests, monstrous others continue to haunt contemporary subjectivity. Winterson suggests the human to be an embattled category—and here we must remember that one of the ways in which humanisation emerges is the easy identification of binary gender, as Judith Butler noted long ago in Bodies That Matter (xiii). Haraway anticipated the mainstreaming of the monster in her metaphor of the cyborg, which was, after all, “monstrous and illegitimate” (15), a post-gender, post-Oedipal figure built from the interaction between flesh and machine, nature and culture. The invention of the human, therefore, has become ever more a precarious thing in a posthuman world. Given her interest in gender and sexuality, one of the chief lenses through which Winterson has been read through is queer theory (Moore; Haslett; McAvan). With its portrayal of new forms of gendered and sexual subjectivity, Frankissstein can be productively read against more recent queer and trans theory that take a more posthuman approach to embodiment, rather than that of the linguistically-constructed, Butler-inflected queer theory, which has largely formed the critical context for Winterson’s work on sex and gender. While queer and posthuman theory are not completely coterminous with one another, both arguably take as their starting point a deconstruction of an image of the human which has historically been normatively considered white, male, heterosexual, and cissexual. Taking queer and trans theory into a material turn, Preciado has notably talked about what he calls a “pharmacopornographic” (Testo Junkie, 33) regime, in which globalised post-industrial capitalism runs on the “biomolecular” and “semiotic-technical” (33) industries that produce gendered and sexual subjectivity. Preciado polemically argues that contemporary capitalism is notable for its pervasive regime of pharmaceuticals that modify the body, and pornography that stimulates sexual desire (and here we might add the semiotic regime of sexuality on smartphones, through chat, photos, and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr). Capital, in this regime, has become “sexual capital” (40). As a result, what is a commonsense cis-normative understanding of transgender subjectivity, which relies upon an economy of medicalised body modification, can be said in Preciado’s analysis to constitute the truth of all subjectivity in the present given the ubiquity of pharmaceutical interventions like the contraceptive pill, Viagra, Prozac, and Ritalin. He says, “you think that you’re cis-females, but you take the Pill; or you think that you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra ... . You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is waking up in me” (393). The figure of the monster has been a trope of transgender studies since at least Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”, which explicitly draws upon Shelley’s Frankenstein as an antecedent for trans subjectivity, suggesting that we see trans bodies as profoundly unnatural, and that as a result, “like the monster, [trans people are] too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of [their] embodiment” (245). Preciado suggests that the monstrosity popularly imagined to be the unique property of transgender bodies, their partiality and hybridity, is in fact more properly a universal condition of the biopolitical regimes that constitute contemporary life. Almost all of us take pills that modify our bodies and minds, almost all of us construct our sexualities through the semiotic—these non-human elements profoundly interweave with the human in new forms of universal monstrosity. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that Winterson would also take up the figure of Frankenstein’s monster in her examination of contemporary forms of posthuman subjectivity. The character of Ry, a transgender doctor, is characterised in the novel as an exemplar of a broader cultural interest in self-making, stating that “it really is my body. I had it made for me” (122). This is a self-making that calls into question the construction of other selves, for as Ry says, “I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. This isn’t surprising; we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body” (114). As strongly as Preciado, the novel suggests that biomolecular and semiotic-technical regimes constitute all contemporary subjectivity, conditioning what is possible, materially and discursively. Far from being uniquely transgender, the desire to transform the body has become universal. Halberstam notes that “the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (27). “I live with doubleness” says Ry (88), who is depicted as both a transgender man and non-binary. Winterson’s rendering of trans subjectivity suggests transgender to be a kind of both/and state, in between or troubling the sex/gender binary. This occurs in broad and occasionally problematic ways, as when Ry describes himself as “fully female [and] also partly male” (97), an idea that has not been universally appreciated by trans readers for whom misgendering has been a critical concern since at least Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. Winterson’s take on trans identity as being fluid but grounded in assigned sex seems in many ways ill at ease with a contemporary trans politics grounded in a post-transition authenticity. But what is at stake in Winterson’s depiction of monstrosity is the impurity of the very category of human, the way that it has become interwoven with the bio-medical and semiotic forms of capitalism. It is not simply that Ry disrupts boundaries—though he does do that—, it is that by troubling the sex/gender binary he calls into questions the construction of identity of those around him, too (Stein dubiously says that he is “not gay” despite his desire for Ry). Where Stein’s posthuman rhetoric describes a future in which “we will be able to choose our bodies” (119), this customisation of the self is suggested to already be here for transgender people; “think of yourself as future-early” (119). Ry’s transness is described by Stein as “interven[ing] in your own evolution [being both] the here and now, and a harbinger of the future” (154). The monstrosity of trans corporeality is thus figured as indicative of a general societal movement, confirming Preciado’s ideas of a generalised bio-medical-semiotic posthumanity. We can see this in another way in Winterson’s depiction of sex bots, which render the landscape of contemporary sexuality in characteristically grotesque ways. The character Ron Lord creates a range of female sex bots from 60s hippy to a bra-less 70s feminist. “All of these girls come in different skin tones: black, brown or white. Plus, you can have a muff on the Vintage model if that’s what you want” (47). Lord suggests that sex bots entail a form of sexuality that is endlessly customisable, that allows people to have sex without baggage or complication: ”a lot of people will be happy to not have any more crap relationships with crap humans” (312). The commodification of sex and becoming-semiotic that Preciado has discussed becomes a way of overcoming the limitations—and indeed ethical responsibility—of human relationships. As Lord puts it, “what we offer is fantasy life, not real life” (46). That there is something monstrous about this sexuality is clear in the novel. We might think of Lord’s sex bots as monstrous in a number of ways—firstly, as problematising the boundaries between the sexes, secondly, the confluence between machinic and organic, and thirdly, the inability to distinguish between public and private. All of the bots are female, only made for a presumed heterosexual male audience. The bot’s proportions are exaggerated, with a “20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs” (91) while her legs are “slightly longer than they would be if she was human. This is fantasy, not nature, so you can have what you want” (37). Here it is normative heterosexual male desire, not queer or trans embodiment, that troubles the very boundaries of the human. The sex bot’s body exposes, in Judith Butler’s terms, the performativity of sex and gender disconnected from the limits of the corporeal, the intensification of normative expectations of heterosexual femininity in the sex industry beyond the boundaries of human possibility. “Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?” asks one character (74), in a pointed critique of the very idea of “female” sex bots. As Preciado notes, in pornography, “sex is performance, which is to say that it is composed of public representations and processes of repetition that are socially and politically regulated” (268). And yet, there is something irreducibly virtual in this regime of “tele-techno-masturbation” (Preciado 266)—for how can a machine be any kind of sex, precisely? How can it have sex? The sex/gender of the “girls in action” is one fraught with the logic of the supplement (recall Derrida, after all, used the term to describe masturbation in Of Grammatology), an addition and replacement, in which the gender and sexuality of the bots is produced through their repetition of norms that are always exceeded and complicated by their performance by a non-human machine. This becomes apparent in a grotesque scene in which one of the sex bots malfunctions and starts saying things while folded up in a cloakroom like “OPEN MY LEGS, DADDY! WIDER!” (90), for which Lord apologises, and states that the bot is “sexually explicit when she is in Bedroom Mode” (91). Preciado has defined pornography as “sexuality transformed into public representation” (266), when the private becomes public. Lord’s sex bots mark the point in which sexuality has become semiotic, technologised, masturbatory. Preciado talks about “the capture of sex and sexuality by economy, the process by which sex becomes work” (274), a work primarily done by women. While Preciado celebrates this becoming-semiotic of sexuality in an accelerationist fashion, it is clear that Winterson has serious ambivalences about this posthuman turn of sexuality (indeed, her earlier book The Stone Gods (2007) is much more positive about the possibilities of cyborg sexuality). Though the posthuman offers possibilities for new forms of sexuality in Frankissstein just as it has for sex and gender, this brings with it the ever-present spectre of monstrosity, the abject disruption of humanist binaries. For Winterson, the power of new technologies that re-shape bodies, minds and desires is one that is profoundly fraught. While there is the pleasure of self-determination (as for Ry), and the potential to transcend human limits, there is also the possibility of new forms of de-humanisation. While Winterson’s early work like 1989’s Sexing the Cherry embraced the pleasures of monstrosity (McAvan), Frankissstein is ultimately more ambivalent about it, if resigned to its future. “I feel the like agony of mind of Victor Frankenstein; having created his monster, he cannot uncreate him. Time has no pity. Time cannot unhappen. What is done is done” (128). New forms of biological modification of the body, new forms of virtualised minds and sexuality, Winterson seems to suggest, are likely to proliferate whether we like it or not. “Nothing we do to the body is without consequences”, reflects Ry (310), suggesting that his body will always be at war with his mind. Just as Mary Shelley imagined Victor Frankenstein as a modern Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods, the posthuman attempts to overcome the limits of the human in a monstrous confluence of human and the bio-technical-semiotic. Though she stages this movement in interesting ways, Winterson is ultimately mostly pessimistic about the possible social consequences of the posthuman turn, if understanding of the desires that animate human attempts to reshape the self. But we need not conclude that posthuman monstrosity is entirely so problematic. Drawing on her work on quantum physics, Karen Barad has written that “matter is not the given, the unchangeable, the bare facts of nature. It is not inanimate, lifeless, eternal. Matter is an imaginative material exploration of non/being, creatively regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation” (“TransMaterialities,” 411). Perhaps we might find new possibilities in the refiguration of matter, of hybrid forms, of unsanctioned coupling. Winterson has Mary Shelley ponder that “in childbirth there is no me/not me” (12)—a productive challenging of binaries that suggests monstrosity to be the very pre-condition of human life in itself. Perhaps what posthuman monsters expose is that the blurring of binaries happens on every level of matter, that the virtual and material are not as distinct from one another as we would like to think, and that the making and remaking of the self is an inherent part of being human. And that the monsters are not just the ones with bolts in their necks or sex bots or hormone injections in their veins—they are, now and always have been, all of us. References Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Barad, Karen. “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ 2.2–3 (2015): 387-421. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden, Polity, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 5-90. Haslett, Jane. “Winterson’s Fabulous Bodies.” Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Ed. Sonya Andermahr. Continuum, 2007. 41-54. Mazurov, Nikita. “Monster/The Unhuman.” Posthuman Glossary. Eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajora. Bloomsbury, 2018. 261-264. McAvan, Emily. Jeanette Winterson and Religion. Bloomsbury, 2020. Moore, Lisa. “Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. Routledge, 1995. 104-127. Preciado, Beatriz (Paul). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013. Preciado, Paul. Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021. Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal, 2007. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus. Oxford UP, 1969. Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. Routledge, 2006. 244-256. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. Grove, 1989. ———. The Stone Gods. Penguin, 2007. ———. Frankissstein. Jonathan Cape, 2019.

Prometheus, chained to a rock, having his liver pecked out by a great bird only for the organ to grow back again each night so that the torture may be repeated afresh the next day must be the quintessential image of masculinity in crisis. This paper will consider Promethean myth and the issues it raises regarding 'creation' including: the role of creator, the relationship between creator and created, the usurping of maternal (creative) power by patriarchy and, not least, the offering of an experimental model in which masculine identity can be recreated. I argue that Promethean myth raises significant issues relating to anxieties associated with notions of masculinity and gender, which are subsequently transposed in Shelley's modernist recasting of the myth, Frankenstein. I then consider 'Promethean' science fiction film, as an area particularly concerned with re-creation, in terms of construction of the self, gender and masculinity. Prometheus & Creation Prometheus (whose name means 'forethought') was able to foresee the future and is credited with creating man from mud/clay. As Man was inferior to other creations and unprotected, Prometheus allowed Man to walk upright [1] like the Gods. He also stole from them the gift of fire, to give to Man, and tricked the Gods into allowing Man to keep the best parts of sacrifices (giving the Gods offal, bones and fat). Thus Prometheus is regarded as the father and creator of Mankind, and as Man's benefactor and protector; whose love of Man (or love of trickery and his own cleverness) leads him to deceive the Gods. Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus (whose name means 'afterthought'), was commissioned to make all the other creations and Prometheus was to overlook his work when it was done. Due to Epimetheus's short-sightedness there were no gifts left (such as fur etc.) to bestow upon Man – the nobler animal which Prometheus was entrusted to make. Prometheus, a Titan, and illegitimate son of Iapetus and the water nymph Clymene (Kirkpatrick, 1991), helped fight against the Titans the side of Zeus, helping Zeus seize the throne. More than simple indication of a rebellious spirit, his illegitimate status (albeit as opposed to an incestuous one – Iapetus was married to his sister Themis) raises the important issues of both legitimacy and filial loyalty, so recurrent within accounts of creation (of man, and human artifice). Some hold that Prometheus is punished for his deceptions i.e. over fire and the sacrifices, thus he is punished as much for his brother's failings as much as for his own ingenuity and initiative. Others maintain he is punished for refusing to tell Zeus which of Zeus's sons would overthrow him, protecting Zeus' half mortal son and his mortal mother. Zeus's father and grandfather suffered castration and usurpment at the hands of their offspring – for both Zeus and Prometheus (pro)creation is perilous. Prometheus's punishment here is for withholding a secret which accords power. In possessing knowledge (power) which could have secured his release, Prometheus is often viewed as emblematic of endurance, suffering and resistance and parental martyrdom. Prometheus, as mentioned previously, was chained to a rock where a great bird came and tore at his liver [2], the liver growing back overnight for the torture to be repeated afresh the following day. Heracles, a half mortal son of Zeus, slays the bird and frees Prometheus, thus Man repays his debt by liberation of his benefactor, or, in other accounts, he is required to take Prometheus's place, and thus liberating his creator and resulting in his own enslavement. Both versions clearly show the strength of bond between Prometheus and his creation but the latter account goes further in suggesting that Man and Maker are interchangeable. Also linked to Promethean myth is the creation of the first woman, Pandora. Constructed (by Jupiter at Zeus's command) on one hand as Man's punishment for Prometheus's tricks, and on the other as a gift to Man from the Gods. Her opening of 'the box', either releasing all mans ills, plagues and woes, or letting all benevolent gifts but hope escape, is seen as disastrous from either perspective. However what is emphasised is that the creation of Woman is secondary to the creation of Man. Therefore Prometheus is not the creator of humankind but of mankind. The issue of gender is an important aspect of Promethean narrative, which I discuss in the next section. Gender Issues Promethean myths raise a number of pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality. Firstly they suggest that both Man and Woman are constructed [3], and that they are constructed as distinct entities, regarding Woman as inferior to Man. Secondly creative power is posited firmly with the masculine (by virtue of the male sex of both Prometheus and Jupiter), negating maternal and asserting patriarchal power. Thirdly Nature, which is associated with the feminine, is surpassed in that whilst Man is made from the earth (mud/clay) it is Prometheus who creates him (Mother Earth providing only the most basic raw materials for production); and Nature is overcome as Man is made independent of climate through the gift of fire. Tensions arise in that Prometheus's fate is also linked to childbirth in so far as that which is internal is painfully rendered external (strongly raising connotations of the abject – which threatens identity boundaries). The intense connection between creation and childbirth indicates that the appropriation of power is of a power resting not with the gods, but with women. The ability to see the future is seen as both frightening and reassuring. Aeschylus uses this to explain Prometheus's tolerance of his fate: he knew he had to endure pain but he knew he would be released, and thus was resigned to his suffering. As the bearer of the bleeding wound Prometheus is feminised, his punishment represents a rite of passage through which he may earn the status 'Father of Man' and reassert and define his masculine identity, hence a masochistic desire to suffer is also suggested. Confrontations with the abject, the threat posed to identity, and Lacanian notions of desire in relation to the other, are subjects which problematise the myth's assertion of masculine power. I will now consider how the Promethean myth is recast in terms of modernity in the story of Frankenstein and the issues regarding male power this raises. Frankenstein - A Modern Prometheus Consistent with the Enlightenment spirit of renewal and reconstruction, the novel Frankenstein emerges in 1818, re-casting Promethean myth in terms of science, and placing the scientist (i.e. man) as creator. Frankenstein in both warning against assuming the power of God and placing man as creator, simultaneously expresses the hopes and fears of the transition from theocratic belief to rationality. One of the strategies Frankenstein gives us through its narrative use of science and technology is a social critique and interrogation of scientific discourse made explicit through its alignment with gender discourse. In appropriating reproductive power without women, it enacts an appropriation of maternity by patriarchy. In aligning the use of this power by patriarchy with the power of the gods, it attempts to deify and justify use of this power whilst rendering women powerless and indeed superfluous. Yet as it offers the patriarchal constructs of science and technology as devoid of social responsibility, resulting in monstrous productions, it also facilitates a critique of patriarchy (Cranny Francis, 1990, p220). The creature, often called 'Frankenstein' rather than 'Frankenstein's monster', is not the only 'abomination to God'. Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a 'spoilt brat of a child', whose overindulgence results in his fantasy of omnipotent power over life itself, and leads to neglect of, and lack of care towards, his creation. Indeed he may be regarded as the true 'monster' of the piece, as he is all too clearly lacking Prometheus's vision and pastoral care [4]. "Neither evil nor inhuman, [the creature] comes to seem little more than morally uninformed, poorly 'put together' by a human creator who has ill served both his creation and his fellow humans." (Telotte, 1995, p. 76). However, the model of the natural – and naturally free – man emerges in the novel from an implied pattern of subjection which demonstrates that the power the man-made constructs of science and technology give us come at great cost: "[Power] is only made possible by what [Mary Shelley] saw as a pointedly modern devaluation of the self: by affirming that the human is, at base, just a put together thing, with no transcendent origin or purpose and bound to a half vital existence at best by material conditions of its begetting."(ibid.) Frankenstein's power expressed through his overcoming of Nature, harnessing of technology and desire to subject the human body to his will, exhibits the modern world's mastery over the self. However it also requires the devaluation of self so that the body is regarded as subject, thus leading to our own subjection. For Telotte (1995, p37), one reflection of our Promethean heritage is that as everything comes to seem machine-like and constructed, the human too finally emerges as a kind of marvellous fiction, or perhaps just another empty invention. Access to full creative potential permits entry "into a true 'no man's land'…. a wonderland...where any wonder we might conceive, or any wondrous way we might conceive of the self, might be fashioned". Certainly the modernist recasting of Promethean myth embodies that train of thought which is most consciously aiming to discover the nature of man through (re)creating him. It offers patriarchal power as a power over the self (independent of the gods); a critique of the father; and the fantasy of (re)construction of the self at the cost of deconstruction of the body which, finally, leads to the subjection of the self. The Promethean model, I maintain, serves to illuminate and further our understanding of the endurance, popularity and allure of fantasies of creation, which can be so readily found in cinematic history, and especially within the science fiction genre. This genre stands out as a medium both well suited to, and enamoured with, Promethean reworkings [5]. As religion (of which Greek mythology is a part) and science both attempt to explain the world and make it knowable they offer the reassurance, satisfaction and the illusion of security and control, whilst tantalising with notions of possible futures. Promethean science fiction film realises the visual nature of these possible futures providing us, in its future visions, with glimpses of alternative ways of seeing and being. Promethean Science Fiction Film Science fiction, can be seen as a 'body genre' delineated not by excess of sex, blood or emotion but by excess of control over the body as index of identity (Cook, 1999, p.193). Science fiction films can be seen to fall broadly into three categories: space flight, alien invaders and futuristic societies (Hayward, 1996, p.305). Within these, Telotte argues (Replications, 1995), most important are the images of "human artifice", which form a metaphor for our own human selves, and have come to dominate the contemporary science fiction film (1995, p11). The science fiction film contains a structural tension that constantly rephrases central issues about the self and constructedness. Paradoxically whilst the science fiction genre profits from visions of a technological future it also displays technophobia – the promises of these fictions represent dangerous illusions with radical and subversive potential, suggesting that nature and the self may be 'reconstructable' rather than stable and unchanging. Whilst some films return us safely to a comforting stable humanity, others embrace and affirm the subversive possibilities advocating an evolution or rebirth of the human. Regardless of their conservative (The Iron Giant, 1999, Planet of the Apes, 1968) or subversive tendencies (Metropolis 1926, Blade Runner 1982, Terminator 1984), they offer the opportunity to explore "a space of desire" (Telotte, p. 153, 1990) a place where the self can experience a kind of otherness and possibilities exceed the experience of our normal being (The Stepford Wives 1974, The Fly 1986, Gattaca 1997 [6]). What I would argue is central to the definition of a Promethean sub-genre of science fiction is the conscious depiction and understanding of the (hu)man subject or artifice as technological or scientific construction rather than natural. Often, as in Promethean myth, there is a mirroring between creator and creation, constructor and constructed, which serves to bind them despite their differences, and may often override them. Power in this genre is revealed as masculine power over the feminine, namely reproductive power; as such tensions in male identity arise and may be interrogated. Promethean (film) texts have at their centre issues of what it is to be human, and within this, what it is to be a man. There is a focus on hegemonic masculinity within these texts, which serves as a measure of masculinity. Furthermore these texts are most emphatically concerned with the construction of masculinity and with masculine power. The notion of creation raises questions of paternity, motherhood, parenting, and identification with the father, although the ways in which these issues are portrayed or explored may be quite diverse. As a creation of man, rather than of 'woman', the subjects created are almost invariably 'other' to their creators, whilst often embodying the fantasies, desires and repressed fears of their makers. That otherness and difference form central organising principles in these texts is undisputable, however there also can be seen to exist a bond between creator and created which is worthy of exploration, as the progeny of man retains a close likeness (though not always physically) to its maker [7]. Particularly in the Promethean strand of science fiction film we encounter the abject, posing a threat to fragile identity constructions (recalling the plight of Prometheus on his rock and his feminised position). I also maintained that 'lack' formed part of the Promethean heritage. Not only are the desires of the creators often lacking in Promethean care and vision, but their creations are revealed as in some way lacking, falling short of their creator's desire and indeed their own [8]. From the very beginnings of film we see the desire to realise (see) Promethean power accorded to man and to behold his creations. The mad scientists of film such as Frankenstein (1910), Homunculus (1916), Alraune (1918), Orlacs Hande (1925) and Metropolis (1926) and Frankenstein (1931) all point to the body as source of subjection and resistance. Whilst metal robots may be made servile, "the flesh by its very nature always rebels" (Telotte, 1995, p. 77). Thus whilst they form a metaphor for the way the modern self is subjugated, they also suggest resistance to that subjugation, pointing to "a tension between body and mind, humanity and its scientific attainments, the self and a cultural subjection" (ibid.). The films of the 1980's and 90's, such as Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987) Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1994), point towards "the human not as ever more artificial but the artificial as ever more human" (Telotte, 1995, p.22). However, these cyborg bodies are also gendered bodies providing metaphors for the contemporary anxieties about 'masculinities'. Just as the tale of Prometheus is problematic in that there exist many variations of the myth [9], with varying accounts capable of producing a range of readings, concepts of 'masculinity' are neither stable nor uniform, and are subject to recasting and reconstruction. Likewise in Promethean science fiction film masculine identities are multiple, fragmented and dynamic. These films do not simply recreate masculinities in the sense that they mirror extant anxieties but recreate in the sense that they 'play' with these anxieties, possibilities of otherness and permeate boundaries. We may see this 'play' as liberating, in that it offers possible ways of being and understanding difference, or conservative, reinstating hegemonic masculinity by asserting old hierarchies. As versions of the myth are reconstructed what new types of creator/creature will emerge? What will they say about our understanding and experiences of "masculinities"? What new possibilities and identities may we envision? Perhaps the most significant aspect of our Promethean heritage is that, as Prometheus is chained to his rock and tortured, through the perpetual regeneration of his liver, almost as if to counterweight or ballast the image of masculinity in crisis, comes the 'reassuring' notion that whatever the strains cracks or injuries the patriarchal image endures: 'we can rebuild him' [10]. We not only can but will, for in doing so we are also reconstructing ourselves. Footnote According to Bulfinch (web) he gave him an upright stature so he could look to the Heavens and gaze on the stars. Linking to Science Fiction narratives of space exploration etc. (Encyclopedia Mythica – [web]) -The liver was once regarded as the primary organ of our being (the heart being our contemporary equivalent) where passions and pain and were felt. Both physically constructed and sociologically, with woman as inferior lesser being and implying gender determinism. This is further articulated to effect in the James Whale film (Frankenstein, 1931), where 'Henry' Frankenstein's creation is regarded as his 'first born' and notions of lineage predominate, ultimately implying he will now pursue more natural methods of (pro)creation. Frankenstein is seen by some as the first cyborg novel in its linking of technology and creation and also often cited as the first science fiction film (although there were others). For example in Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), the creation of man occurs through conscious construction of the self, acknowledging that we are all constructed and acknowledging that masculinity must be reconstructed if it is to be validated. Patriarchy has worked to mythologise our relationship to (mother) nature, so that the human becomes distinct from the manufactured. What is perhaps the most vital aspect of the character Vincent in Gattaca is his acknowledgement that the body must be altered, restructured, reshaped and defined in order to pass from insignificance to significance in terms of hegemonic masculine identity. It is therefore through a reappraisal of the external that the internal gains validity. See Foucault on resemblance and similitude (in The Gendered Cyborg, 2000). See Scott Bukatman on Blade Runner in Kuhn, 1990. The tale of Prometheus had long existed in oral traditions and folklore before Hesiod wrote of it in Theogeny and Works and Days, and Aeschylus, elaborated on Hesiod, when he wrote Prometheus Bound (460B.C). Catchphrase used in the 1970's popular TV series The Six Million Dollar Man in relation to Steve Austin the 'bionic' character of the title. References Bernink, M. & Cook, P. (eds.) The Cinema Book (2nd edition). London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999. Clute, J. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995. Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London: Routledge, 1993. Hall, S., Held, D. & McLennan, G. (eds.) Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with The Open University, 1993. Jancovich, M. Rational Fears: American horror in the 1950's. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Jeffords, S. Can Masculinity be Terminated? In Cohan, S. & Hark, I.R. (eds.) Screening the Male. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Kirkup, G., Janes, L., Woodward, K. & Hovenden, F. (eds.) The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Kuhn, A. (ed.) Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Sobchack, V. Screening Space. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press 1999. Telotte, J.P. A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Telotte, J.P. Replications. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995 Bulfinch's Mythology, The Age of Fable – Chapter 2: Prometheus and Pandora: (accessed 21st March 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org/fables/bull2.html Bulfinch's Mythology: (accessed March 21st 2000) http://www.bulfinch.org.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Greek Mythology: (accessed June 15th 2000) http://oingo.com/topic/20/20246.html Encyclopaedia Mythica: Articles (accessed 15th June 2000) http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/articles.html

The Gothic is not always suited to women’s emancipation, but it is very well suited to women’s anger, and all other instances of what Barbara Creed (3) would refer to as ‘abject’ femininity: excessive, uncanny and uncontained instances that disturb patriarchal norms of womanhood. This article asserts that the conventions of the Gothic genre are well suited to expressions of women’s rage; invoking Sarah Ahmed’s work on the discomforting presence of the kill-joy in order to explore how the often-alienating processes of uncensored female anger coincide with contemporary notions of the Monstrous Feminine. This should not suggest that the Gothic is a wholly feminist genre - one need only look to Jane Eyre to observe the binarised construction of Gothic women as either ‘pure’ or ‘deviant’: virginal heroine or mad woman in the attic. However, what is significant about the Gothic genre is that it often permits far more in-depth, even sympathetic explorations of ‘deviant femininity’ that are out of place elsewhere.Indeed, the normative, rationalist demand for good health and accommodating cheerfulness is symptomatic of what Queer Crip scholar Katarina Kolářová (264) describes as ‘compulsory, curative positivity’ – wherein the Monstrousness of deviant femininity, Queerness and disability must be ‘fixed’ in order to produce blithe, comforting feminine docility. It seems almost too obvious to point to The Yellow Wallpaper as a perfect exemplar of this: the physician husband of Gillman’s protagonist literally prescribes indolence and passivity as ‘cures’ for what may well be post-partum depression – another instance of distinctly feminine irrationality that must be promptly contained. The short story is peppered through with references to the protagonist’s ‘illness’ as a source of consternation or discomfort for her husband, who declares, “I feel easier with you now” (134) as she becomes more and more passive.The notion of men’s comfort is important within discussions of women’s anger – not only within the Gothic, but within a broader context of gendered power and privileged experience. Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness asserts that we “describe as happy a situation that you wish to defend. Happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish” (573) For Ahmed, happiness is not solely an individual experience, but rather is relational, and as much influenced by normative systems of power as any other interpersonal process.It has historically fallen upon women to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure that men are comfortable; being quiet and unargumentative, remaining both chase and sexually alluring, being maternal and nurturing, while scrupulously censoring any evidence of pregnancy, breastfeeding or menstrual cycles (Boyer 79). If a woman has ceased to be happy within these terms, then she has failed to be a good woman, and experiences what Ahmed refers to as a ‘negative affect’ – a feeling of being out of place. To be out of place is to be an ‘affect alien’: one must either continue feeling alienated or correct one’s feelings (Ahmed 582). Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild uses the analogy of a bride feeling miserable at her wedding, obliging herself to bring her feelings in-line with what is expected of her, “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy” (Hochschild 61).Ahmed uses to the term ‘Kill Joy’ to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards. The stereotype of the angry black woman, or the humourless feminist persist because these women are not complicit in social orders that hold the comfort of white men as paramount (583); their presence is discomforting.Contrary to its title, Killing Joy does not advocate for an end to happiness. Rather, one might understand the act of killing joy as a tactic of subjective honesty – an acknowledgement of dis-ease, of one’s alienation and displacement within the social contract of reciprocal happiness. Here I use the word dis-ease as a deliberate double entendre – implying both the experience of a negative affect, as well as the apparent social ‘illness’ of refusing acquiescent female joy. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s passive femininity is ironically both the antithesis and the cause of her Monstrous transformation, demonstrating an instance of feminine liminality that is the hallmark of the Gothic heroine.Here I introduce the example of Lily Frankenstein, a modern interpretation of the Bride of the Creature, portrayed by Billie Piper in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. In Shelley’s novel the Bride is commissioned for the Creature’s contentment, a contract that Frankenstein acknowledges she could not possibly have consented to (Shelley 206). She is never given sentience or agency; her theoretical existence and pre-natal destruction being premised entirely on the comfort of men. Upon her destruction, the Creature cries, “Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?” (Shelley 209). Her first film portrayal by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1936) is iconic, but brief. She is granted no dialogue, other than a terrified scream, followed by a goose-like hiss of disgust at Boris Karloff’s lonely Creature. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) merges the characters of Elizabeth and the Bride into the same doomed woman. After being murdered by the Creature, she is resurrected by Frankenstein – and consequently fought over by both. Her inevitable suicide is her one moment of tragic autonomy.Penny Dreadful is the first time that the Bride has been given an opportunity to speak for herself. Lily’s character arc is neither that of the idealised, innocent victim, nor is she entirely abject and wanton: she is – quite literally – two women in one. Before she is re-animated and conditioned by Victor Frankenstein to be the perfect bride, she was Brona, a predictably tragic, Irish street-walker with a taste for whisky and a consumptive cough. Diane Long Hoeveler describes the ambiguous duality of the Gothic feminine arising from the fantasies of middle-class woman writing gothic fiction during the 19th century (106). Drawing upon Harriet Guest’s examination of the development of femininity in early Gothic literature, Hoeveler asserts that women may explore the ‘deviant’ pleasures of wanton sexuality and individualistic, sadistic power while still retaining the chaste femininity demanded of them by their bourgeois upbringings. As both innocent victim of patriarchy and Monstrous Feminine, the construction of the gothic heroine simultaneously criminalises and deifies women.I assert that Penny Dreadful demonstrates the blurring of these boundaries in such a way that the fantasy of the sympathetic, yet Monstrous Gothic Feminine is launched out of the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage. Her transition from coerced docility and abject, sexualised anger manifests in the second season of the show. The Creature – having grown impatient and jealous – comes to collect his Bride and is met with a furious refusal.Lily’s rage is explosive. Her raw emotion is evidently startling to the Creature, who stands in astonishment and fear at something even more monstrous and alien than himself – a woman’s unrestrained anger. For all his wretched ‘Otherness’ and misery, he is yet a man - a bastard son of the Enlightenment, desperate to be allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of reason. In both Shelley’s original novel and the series, he tries (and fails) to establish himself as a worthy and rational citizen; settling upon the Bride as his coveted consolation prize for his Monstrous failure. If he cannot be a man as his creator was, then he shall have a companion that is ‘like’ him to soothe his pain.Consequently, Lily’s refusal of the Creature is more than a rejection – it is the manifestation of an alien affect that has been given form within the undead, angry woman: a trifecta of ‘Otherness’. “Shall we wonder the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows?” She mocks the Creature’s bucolic, romantic ideals, killing his joyful phantasy that she, as his companion, will love and comfort him despite his Monstrousness (“Memento Mori”).Lily’s confrontation of the Creature is an unrestrained litany of women’s pain – the humiliation of corsetry and high heels, the slavery of marriage, the brutality of sexual coercion: all which Ahmed would refer to as the “signs of labour under the sign of happiness” (573). These are the pains that women must hide in order to maintain men’s comfort, the sacrificial emotional labours which are obfuscated by the mandates of male-defined femininity. The Gothic’s nurturance of anger transforms Lily’s outburst from an act of cruelty and selfishness to a site of significant feminine abjection. Through this scene Hochschild’s comment takes on new meaning: Lily – being quite literally the Bride (or the intended Bride) of the Creature – has turned the tables and has altered the process of disaffection – and made herself happy at the expense of men.Lily forms a militia of ‘fallen’ women from whom she demands tribute: the bleeding, amputated hands of abusive men. The scene is a thrilling one, recalling the misogyny of witch trials, sexual violence and exploitation as an army of angry kill joys bang on the banquet table, baying for men’s blood (“Ebb Tide”). However, as seems almost inevitable, Lily’s campaign is short-lived. Her efforts are thwarted and her foot soldiers either murdered or fled. We last see her walking dejectedly through the London fog, her fate and future unknown.Lily’s story recalls an instance of the ‘bad feminism’ that nice, respectable, mainstream feminists seek to distance themselves from. In her discussion of the acquittal of infamous castatrix Lorena Bobbitt, poet Katha Pollitt (65-66) observes the scramble by “nice, liberal middle-class professional” feminists to distance themselves from the narratives of irrational rage that supposedly characterise ‘victim feminism’ – opting instead for the comforting ivory towers of self-control and diplomacy.Lily’s speech to her troops is seen partly through the perspective of an increasingly alarmed Dorian Gray, who has hitherto been enjoying the debauched potential of these liberated, ‘deviant’ women, recalling bell hooks’ observation that “ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency” (41). This is no longer a coterie of wanton women that he may enjoy, but a sisterhood of angry, vengeful kill-joys that will not be respectable, or considerate of his feelings in their endeavours.Here, parallels arise between the absolutes drawn between women as agents or victims, and the positioning of women as positive, progressive ‘rational’ beings or melancholic kill-joys that Ahmed describes. We need only turn to the contemporary debate surrounding the MeToo movement (and its asinine, defensive response of ‘Not All Men’) to observe that the process of identifying oneself as a victim has – for many – become synonymous with weakness, even amongst other feminists. Notably, Germaine Greer referred to the movement as ‘whinging’, calling upon women to be more assertive, instead of wallowing in self-victimisation and misandry, as Lily supposedly does (Miller).While Greer may be a particularly easy strawman, her comments nonetheless recall Judith Halberstam’s observations of prescriptive paternalism (maternalism?) within Western feminist discourse. His chapter Shadow Feminisms uses the work of Gayatri Spivak to describe how triumphalist narratives of women’s liberation often function to restrict the terms of women’s agency and expression – particularly those of women of colour.Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? asserts that the colonial narratives inherent within white feminists’ attempts to ‘save’ non-Western women are premised upon the imagined heroicism of the individual, which in turn demands the rejection of ‘subaltern’ strategies like passiveness, anger and refusal. She asks, “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power?” (9). Put more simply, both Halberstam and Spivak beg the question of why it is necessary for women and other historically marginalised groups to adopt optimistic and respectable standards of agency? Especially when those terms are pre-emptively defined by feminists like Greer.Halberstam conceptualises Shadow Feminisms in the melancholic terms of refusal, undoing, failure and anger. Even in name, Shadow Feminism is well suited to the Gothic – it has no agenda of triumphant, linear progress, nor the saccharine coercion of individualistic optimism. Rather, it emphasises the repressed, quiet forms of subversion that skulk in the introspective, resentful gloom. This is a feminism that cannot and will not let go of its traumas or its pain, because it should not have to (Halberstam, Queer Art 128-129).Thus, the Monstrousness of female rage is given space to acknowledge, rather than downplay or dismiss the affective-alienation of patriarchy. To paraphrase scholars Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, the Gothic allows women to explore the hidden or censured expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment within patriarchal societies, being a “coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body” (Smith & Wallace 2).It may be easy to dismiss the Gothic as eldritch assemblages of Opheliac madness and abject hyperbole, I argue that it is valuable precisely because it invites the opening of festering wounds and the exploration of mouldering sepulchres that are shunned by the squeamish mainstream; coaxing the skeletons from the closet so that they may finally air their musty grievances. As Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, the Gothic represents the return of the repressed and thus encourages rather than censors the exploration of grief, madness and irrationality (Skin Shows 19). Accordingly, we may understand Lily’s rage as what Halberstam would refer to as a Monstrous Technology (21-22) – more specifically, a technology of the Monstrous Feminine: a significant site of disruption within Gothic narratives that not only ‘shows’ the source of its abjection, but angrily airs its dirty laundry for everyone to see.Here emerges the distinction between the ‘non-whinging’, respectable feminism advocated by the likes of Greer and Lily’s Monstrous, Gothic Feminism. Observing a demonstration by a group of suffragettes, Lily describes their efforts as unambitious – “their enemies are same, but they seek equality” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). Lily has set her sights upon mastery. By allowing her rage to manifest freely, her movement has manifested as the violent misandry that anti-suffragists and contemporary anti-feminists alike believe is characteristic of women’s liberation, provoking an uncomfortable moment for ‘good’ feminists who desperately wish to avoid such pejorative stereotypes.What Lily offers is not ethical. It does not conform to any justifiable feminist ideology. She represents that which is repressed, a distinctly female rage that has no place within any rational system of belief. Nonetheless, Lily remains a sympathetic character, her “doomed, keening women” (“Ebb Tide”) evoking a quiet, subversive thrill of solidarity that must be immediately hushed. This, I assert, is indicative of the liminal ambiguity that makes the Monstrous Feminine so unsettling, and so significant.And Monsters are always significant. Their ‘Otherness’ functions like lighthouses of meaning. Further, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (6) reminds us, Monsters signify not only the fragile boundaries of human subjectivity and discourse, but also the origins of the alterity that defines them. Like the tragic creature of Shelley’s masterpiece, Monsters eventually follow their creators home to demand an explanation – their revenant terror demands accountability (Cohen 20). What Lily exemplifies does not have to make others comfortable, and it is under no obligation to remain within any standards of ethics. To return one last time to Halberstam, I argue that the Monstrosity manifested within female rage is valuable precisely because it because it obliges us “to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way” (Halberstam, Queer Art 162). Therefore, to be angry, to dwell on traumatic pasts, and to revel in the ‘failure’ of negativity is to ensure that these genealogies are not ignored.When finally captured, Victor Frankenstein attempts to lobotomise her, promising to permanently take away the pain that is the cause of her Monstrous rage. To this, Lily responds: “there are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are, but without them, we don’t exist” (“Perpetual Night and the Blessed Dark”). Lily refuses to let go of her grief and her anger, and in so doing she fails to coalesce within the placid, docile femininity demanded by Victor Frankenstein. But her refusal is not premised in an obdurate reactionism. Rather, it is a tactic of survival. By her own words, without her trauma – and that of countless women before her – she does not exist. The violence of rape, abuse and the theft of her agency have defined her as both a woman and as a Monster. “I’m the sum part of one woman’s days. No more, no less”, she tells Frankenstein. To eschew her rage is to deny its origin.So, to finish I ask readers to take a moment, and dwell on that rage. On women’s rage. On yours. On the rage that may have been directed at you. Does that make you uncomfortable?Good.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.3 (2010): 571-593.Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.“Ebb Tide.”. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.“Good and Evil Braided Be.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. USA: Duke UP, 1995.———. The Queer Art of Failure. USA: Duke UP, 2011.Hoeveler, Diane. “The Female Gothic, Beating Fantasies and the Civilizing Process.” Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity. Eds. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 101-132.hooks, bell. Communion: The Female Search for Love. USA: Harper Collins, 2003.Kolářová, Kristina. “The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip: On the Cruel Optimism of Neo-Liberal Transformation in the Czech Republic.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014): 257-274.“Memento Mori.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2015.Miller, Nick. “Germaine Greer Challenges #MeToo Campaign.” Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan. 2018.“Perpetual Night/The Blessed Dark.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Pollitt, Katha. “Lorena’s Army.” “Bad Girls”/“Good Girls”: Women, Sex & Power in the Nineties. Eds. Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. 65-67.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. Australia: Penguin Books, 2009 [1818].Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.Smith, Andrew, and Diana Wallace. “The Female Gothic: Now and Then”. Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 1-7.

In Women in the House of Fiction Lorna Sage writes: "…the novels too treated the domain of character and representation as the place where the 'others' lived, playing their parts and acting out their roles…" (Sage 1992: viii). Sage investigates the impact women writers have had on post-war fiction employing that every novelist tries to probe the boundaries of fiction, to "voice" their views and positions through the language of literature. Using Henry James's metaphor of fiction as a house, however, Sage is indebted to one of the writers she read and wrote about – Angela Carter. It was Sage, as the first-ever critic to discuss Carter's works thoroughly, who noticed that houses are unable to endure holding the woman and her transgressive power at bay. All houses, castles, buildings, every entity that stands for patriarchal power, are eventually destroyed. Sage reads this as an attack from women novelists against their literary inheritance (Sage 1992: ix). Womanhood is a topic widely outspoken and deeply problematic. Each text takes on different ways to construct, deconstruct, explain and see the woman, her body, her role: in society, history, culture. I argue that women writers project a certain amount of personal experience into the fictional worlds they create - an approach Ellen Moers had in Literary Women and her reading of Frankenstein as Merry Shelly's personified trauma of giving birth. My paper outlines cultural contexts as relevant to the works of different writers. It traces how intentional or non-intentional intertextuality connects texts and motifs; my article seeks to answer how different cultural contexts brought about similar problems. To complete the outlined goals, I rely on close reading of particular texts.

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. 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